Meal Planning

Some friends have been asking how I stay organized enough to plan out meals for Jake and I that have variety + taste awesome, so I thought I'd share my method for meal planning with you all! 

I've been working on the way I plan meals for the past few months, + I think I've finally got a method that really works for me. Jake or I are at the grocery store only about once a week (sometimes two if we run out of milk or something) so it saves us gas + time from making multiple trips a week just to put together one meal.

I try to stay about a month ahead with our meals, planning when I have time, even if it's only a few minutes. This way, I never fall behind + we don't go through periods of time where we're eating the same thing every night for a week because I was too busy to plan. Again, this works for us, but it might not work for someone else.

Every night of the week has a different "theme": crockpot, soup or sandwich, meat/international, pasta, casserole, + lunch prep. I don't cook every night since there's only two of us + even when doing a half batch of a recipe we usually have leftovers, so we don't have every "theme" every week, but at least it keeps me from picking all chicken recipes for every day of the week that I cook! 

Once I pick a recipe + assign it to a date, I'll create a little sticky tab with the date written on it + stick it to that page in my cookbook. This makes the recipe easy to find once that date rolls around, + also helps me when planning the following month, because I know that I should avoid using all the same recipes over again, which I can see from looking at the sticky tabs.